"The curator is getting more cred for recognizing good content than the creator is for making good content."

Robin Good's insight:

Tara Hunt, has an interesting article spotlighting the fast growing importance that curators are gradually gaining on the Internet and on the subsequent need to find ways for properly compensating original content creators.

She writes: "...while creators are necessary and amazing, curators are the ones raking in the dough.

I was alerted today by a friend that a video that Carlos and I made for Vine that had become super popular (over 118,000 likes + 77,000 Re-vines) was featured on a Facebook page called Best Vines and making its way around (with over 230,000 likes + 46,000 shares). The page owner lifted the content off of Vine and reposted it on his own page (no credit back to the original). This page has over 6.2M likes.

Now, this video of Ridley took us all of 30 seconds to make and we had no idea it would ‘go viral’, but for people like Will Sasso who appears to make it his full-time gig to make entertaining, engaging content on Vine and other places, this would probably be a bit of a violation.

The curator is getting more cred for recognizing good content than the creator is for making good content."

And she is definitely right.

But as she correctly points out, there are already effective solutions in place, such as the YouTube authorship claiming facility which allows for original creators to digitally mark their own creations while giving full permission to curators to leverage and re-distribute them. This YouTube approach is the one that makes it possible for content creators to receive a share of the advertising revenue coming to YouTube, even when their clips are curated and played back on other sites.

The opportunity is there, not just for textual content, but also for video, music, photography and all of their sub-categories to be curated and monetized for the benefit of everyone.

Thought provoking, however, montetization of curation is still very limited. Scoop.It & others offer no means for monetization at all. Like content creation, & most everything on the net, compensation for cuation is still a giant question mark.

I've heard everyone from Jaron Lanier to Tim Berners-Lee and a number of other noteworthy tech brains bring up this topic up. How do the creators of content and innovative ideas cash in on the contributions they have made that everyone is passing along and sharing? No one wants their work and thoughts stolen and most everyone I know wants creative people to keep creating what we need and want and would like them rewarded and to be able to earn a decent living doing that. This article is about how we can make sure that happens.

Robin Good: Felix Salmon on the Reuters blogs has a short but insightful article on how content creation and distribution is changing and on the diminishing value of being an integrated silo that created, edits, publishes and distributes its own content.

He writes: "Facebook and Google have become two of the biggest media companies in the world in extremely short amounts of time, precisely because they don’t have much interest in owning any content.

Rupert Murdoch looks at Google and sees a pirate because he does everything: he both creates content (think 20th Century Fox), and also distributes it (think Sky TV). ...

While the social, digital world is one where the biggest media companies have a much lighter touch, and where the content creators with the broadest reach will be the ones who care the least about protecting their copyrights.

I suspect that we’re only in the very early days of seeing how this is going to disrupt just about every media organization built on the idea of hosting a website and selling ads, including highly socially-attuned ones like the Huffington Post. HuffPo is built on the idea that when stories are shared on Twitter or Facebook, that will drive traffic back to huffingtonpost.com, where it can then monetize that traffic by selling it to advertisers.

But in future, the most viral stories are going to have a life of their own, being shared across many different platforms and being read by people who will never visit the original site on which they were published."

The U.S. newspaper industry has lost more than $40 billion in ad revenue in the past decade — over half of that in the last four years alone — and Google’s ad revenues are now more than twice what the industry pulls in.

Robin Good's insight:

From the original article by Mathew Ingram on Paidcontent.org: "...ad revenue falling off a cliff about a decade ago, hitting a brief plateau in the mid-2000s and then free-falling over the next several years.

...The speed with which billions of dollars in advertising revenue simply evaporated over the past decade is incredible.

...Of course, all of that advertising revenue didn’t simply disappear overnight. So where did it go if it wasn’t going to newspapers? It went online, naturally — and the second chart shows the biggest beneficiary of that exodus: namely, Google."

People are always looking to place fault. Things change when something better comes along. Just because newspapers were first doesn't mean they are best. Tobacco knows time is limited, that would explain why they bought Kraft Foods!

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.